Student Question
How does Woolf make Clarissa Dalloway compelling by showing her thoughts?
Quick answer:
Woolf uses stream-of-consciousness to show us Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts, which are compelling because, despite the moments of darkness and fear that make her human, Mrs. Dalloway embraces a positive outlook on life. For example, she loves the present moment. "What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab."
Woolf spends much time inside Clarissa Dalloway's head, recording her thoughts as she thinks them in stream-of-consciousness. Through her thoughts, Clarissa becomes compelling to us, first, because she reveals such an acute sensitivity to her surroundings and such a love of life. For example, though she is in her fifties, in the first paragraph of the novel she exhibits a childlike delight in the day:
And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
The simile of comparing the morning to a beautiful day at the beach is upbeat and draws us to her because most of us are attracted to people who seem happy.
The following quote also shows her exuberance for life. In it, her thoughts flow from her sensitivity to other people to her memories of the past, to details like the china cockatoo, and then to her love of...
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being in the present moment:
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton—such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the wagons plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab.
But Mrs. Dalloway would be nothing more than a Pollyanna if her head was forever filled with happy, chipper thoughts. What makes her compelling, too, is the way she acknowledges her doubts, such as whether she made the right choice in marrying Richard rather than Peter Walsh:
Now of course, thought Clarissa, he’s enchanting! Perfectly enchanting! Now I remember how impossible it was ever to make up my mind—and why did I make up my mind—not to marry him?
She also is critical about about Miss Kilman and the woman's influence over her daughter, worries her party will be a failure, and can, at least for a moment, identify why Septimus Smith might commit suicide:
She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.
Her happiness is all the more poignant because she chooses a positive path and outlook despite sometimes feeling worry, fear, and despair.